Cyser making

I don't seem to have blogged about making cyser since 2006, but I do still do it every year.

Last year I experimented and made three beverages from the cider I bought at the ciderfest and fermented them all on the wild yeasts from the Carlson Orchards apples. It was reasonably successful, although none of them is really ready to drink yet. (A year is a pretty short time for a cyser, and should be OK for a cider, but it really tastes like the slightly sulfurous quality in the one-ingredient cider is that kind that goes away with age.)

So this year I'm making 3 gallons of the one-ingredient cider (simplest recipe in the world -- put the cider in a carboy and put on a fermentation lock and forget about it for a few months, then bottle) and 5 gallons of the cyser (almost as simple except that you add between two and three pounds of honey for each gallon of cider).

I still had about 8 pounds of the 20 pounds of honey I bought last year from an apiary in Lowell in a Wort Processors group buy. The hard part about making cyser if you don't buy the honey and the cider at the same time is that the honey has crystalized, so you have to heat it gently to convince it to turn back into a liquid so you can pour it intoyour carboy.

Last year I skipped that step, and used a brewing bucket instead of a carboy, and missed watching the liquid clear as the yeas flocculates out. So this year I swore I was going to do it right, so I spent half an hour or so this morning watching honey crystals reliquify, and pushing the ones that hadn't through the funnel with a skewer.

I also have 10 pounds of honey that I bought yesterday from Mike Graney, which would have been easier to use but I thought I should use the older stuff first. I'll add some of Mike's honey when the krausen (a thick layer of bubbles from actively fermenting yeast, which usually disappears after a day or two) has gone down, but right now I'm closer to the top of the carboy than I like to be.